Thursday Bram is a full-time freelance writer who is always on the lookout for an application that will increase her productivity. She has written about technology for such websites as Lifehack and WebWorkerDaily and maintains her own blog at ThursdayBram.com.

There are countless screensavers available for showing beautiful photographs and funky swirling graphics – we’ve even rounded up a selection previously. But what if you’d like your monitor to show something more useful?

Today we’re looking at 30 different screensavers that will inspire and inform you. Whether that’s keeping you up-to-date with news, showing information about incoming messages, recent tweets, or even helping you learn a new language!

Google Quick Search Box is the next step in the evolution of Google Desktop: it goes a step beyond simply letting you search the files on your computer to provide an integrated tool that lets you take a variety of actions from a launch bar. It’s designed in part by Nicholas Jitkoff, one of the original developers of Quicksilver.

The biggest advancement with Google Quick Search Box is the ability to perform actions on your search results. Where once you could only find files from Google Desktop, you can now launch files, email them as attachments, and move them to the trash just as easily.